I had to take our dog Chandler (my “best puppy”, the “big man”, or “Chanva” as our daughter Elizabeth used to call him) to the vet Thursday after I discovered, while giving him a bath, what looked like a bloody gash on his throat. I was horrified. I literally gasped in shock (I'm such a girl sometimes, I know) 🙂 as drops of blood dripped into the bathwater. It looked like someone had cut his throat. How was that possible when he never leaves the house or yard except when I walk him every night? He wasn't bleeding profusely and the folds in his skin on his neck seemed to keep the wound from being exposed (which is why I never saw it before).

I pulled him out of the bath, dried him off (mostly), and called the vet. This was around 1:30, and she had a 3:00 slot available. I gathered up Chandler and Elizabeth and drove from Antioch to Franklin. We really need to get a closer vet. 🙂 Anyway, when we got there, the vet assistant says, “Let's take a look at his neck.” She starts feeling around and comes up with a large rubber band. “How'd this get here?” she asked.

The rubber band, just like an embedded chain or collar you see on animal abuse documentaries, had not only rubbed his neck raw, but had cut into it. They took Chandler to a back room and told us to come back in a couple hours while they cleaned and dressed the wound. Elizabeth swore up and down she didn't do it, but I didn't believe her. That's her first impulse now: blame someone else, even when you see her doing it. It then occurred to me one of her little friends might have put that rubber band around Chandler's neck. I could tell she was upset thinking she might have hurt Chandler, so I dropped it.

To make her feel better, I then told her she probably actually helped save his life because she was the one who kept insisting we give the pugs a bath. If it wasn't for that, there's no telling how bad it would have gotten. When we picked Chandler up, the wound was raw and scary-looking, just like someone had slit his throat. They told us to go out and buy Telfa pads (we bought something comparable by Curad), put regular old honey on them, and wrapped his neck with a bandanna. And that's what we've been treating him with, successfully, for the past four or five days. He's finally bandanna-free, and it looks like he's going to be fine. I just need to give him another bath to get all that dried honey off his chest.

See also Honey, I Killed the Superbug or dogs category